Interpreters Read online

  ‘I don’t know. It’s just one of those things.’

  Angie leads me into the sitting room.

  ‘My parents moved here – gosh! – over thirty years ago it must be now. I think it was your parents they bought it from – or maybe the people after them. And then Geoff and I bought it from Mum and Dad when they retired to Eastbourne. It’s such a brilliant place for the children to grow up in. So safe. Coffee? Tea? Something stronger?’

  ‘Tea would be great. Thanks.’

  ‘Make yourself at home. I won’t be a minute.’

  I clear a small space on the sofa and sit down amongst dismembered Barbie limbs and pieces of Lego in the shape of guns and warships.

  ‘Sorry about the un-pc-ness of it all,’ Angie calls from the kitchen. ‘I tried, really I did. I don’t even remember buying the Barbies. They just seemed to appear overnight and then breed. And not a Ken in sight. As for the guns…’ She trails off as the kettle begins to bubble noisily. ‘Milk? Sugar?’

  ‘Just milk, please.’

  ‘Still, you’ll know all about little girls and their dolls.’

  I try to remember Susanna’s room in Cameroon. Whitewashed walls; a low metal bed covered with a brightly coloured bedspread. A cave she made for her kittens from cardboard boxes and an old blanket. A pile of books on her bedside table. But no dolls. Was that something else I did wrong?

  Angie comes into the room bearing a wooden tray with two mugs and a plate of shortbread biscuits. She hesitates, then nimbly lifts a gym-honed leg and sweeps the contents of the coffee table on to the floor with her foot before placing the tray on it.

  ‘That’s better. I should really just put the whole lot in a bin bag and chuck it all out. No one would notice,’ she says, good-humouredly. ‘You know, the guinea pig had been dead and buried for a fortnight before any of them noticed it was missing. And then Catherine had the nerve to claim to be too upset about its death to go to school! And once she started, Anna and Eleanor felt they had to join in and insisted they couldn’t go either. In the end I gave in and the whole lot stayed at home. Mourning away in front of daytime TV. Here, have this mug.’

  She passes me the one adorned with dancing princesses.

  ‘I’ve lost touch with everyone except Emily Lancaster, really. But I went to one of those hideous school reunions a couple of years ago, you know,’ she says, cradling her mug in her hands. ‘What a mistake that was! Everyone seemed to have got fat around the middle, gone grey and married solicitors. So I booked into a gym double quick and got rid of the grey.’ She pats her strawberry-blonde hair. ‘I thought about making Geoff give up all his lovely conveyancing and uprooting the kids to rural Catalonia but it seemed too much of an effort. You know, the only person from my year who stood out as having done something rather more significant with her life than bed down in the suburbs was Shiranee Batterjee. You must remember her – the only Asian girl in the school in those dark old days. She’s a neurosurgeon at Bart’s now. Biscuit?’

  ‘No, thanks.’

  ‘Didn’t you have a ridiculously beautiful older brother?’ she asks.

  ‘I did. Still do, in fact. Max. Still beautiful in a rather middle-aged kind of way.’

  ‘Max! Of course. How could I forget! Becky had the most almighty crush on him for months. A violinist, wasn’t he?’

  ‘He was, but not any more.’

  ‘Oh, that’s a shame. He was very good, I seem to remember.’

  ‘Yes, he was.’

  ‘I’m sure that was why Becky carried on with the violin even though she was absolutely awful at it. Just on the off-chance that, if they ever bolstered up the crummy school orchestra with boys from St Peter’s, she might get to sit behind Max. I’m not sure she’s shown the same devotion to anyone since.’

  ‘He’s always had that kind of effect on girls – and it’s never stopped surprising him.’

  ‘So who was the lucky girl who got him in the end?’

  ‘No one did. He’s never married. Never even lived with anyone.’

  ‘I’d better not tell Becky that. She might think she’d be in with a chance – not that she’s free, of course.’

  ‘Well, when I say he’s never lived with anyone, I mean he’s had relationships with women – some pretty long-term – but he’s never lived with any of them in the conventional couple-living-together way. He likes communities. Groups of unrelated people living together.’

  ‘God! I find living with groups of related people hard enough,’ laughs Angie, nodding at the row of framed school photographs and one large wedding portrait on the mantelpiece. ‘And what about you?’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Husband? Children? In case I never do find that article.’

  ‘One child. A daughter. Susanna. Pretty grown-up now. She grew up in Africa –’

  ‘Gosh and there was I thinking Catalonia was exotic.’

  ‘Yes, well – and then in Dorset. At a Steiner school.’

  Angie looks puzzled, as though she had once known what a Steiner school was but couldn’t quite remember what her opinion had been.

  ‘She studied textiles at Brighton University. It was a toss-up between that or studying music – the flute – at Manchester. And now she lives with her boyfriend in London, not far from me. George. He’s a journalist. They seem very happy.’

  ‘Lovely! I just can’t imagine getting to that stage – having independent, grown-up children living away from home, earning their own living.’

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t go that far. The “earning her own living” bit might take a while. Though she’s not been doing badly recently. She’s set up a batik business.’

  ‘Emily said something about that – and about her and your brother. But I can’t remember the details.’

  I can feel myself holding my breath. I exhale as quietly as I can.

  ‘Are you OK?’ asks Angie. ‘Becky’s been suffering with hot flushes too. What we women have to bear!’

  ‘Sorry – yes, I’m fine.’

  ‘And what about your husband?’

  ‘I never had one of those,’ I say lightly.

  Angie frowns very slightly.

  ‘I live with my partner, Dan,’ I add. ‘We’ve been together for about ten years.’

  Angie looks relieved, or perhaps I’m just imagining it.

  ‘He’s a documentary-maker. I met him when he was going out to make a film in northern Cameroon and wanted some advice. He travels a lot – he’s filming in Mumbai at the moment – and I’m mostly based here now. I lecture in anthropology.’

  ‘Sounds lovely.’ She smiles. ‘Listen, I have to collect Ben – my youngest – from nursery. It’s literally just down the road – where the little shopping arcade used to be. I’ll probably be about ten minutes by the time I’ve had a full report on who he’s refused to play with today and what food he threw where. Help yourself to more tea and stuff. And there’s a new Hello! magazine somewhere amongst this mess.’

  ‘Thanks. That’s very kind.’

  ‘Mum and Dad built the conservatory on the back but, apart from that, nothing much has changed. We’ve been meaning to put in a new kitchen for ages but somehow we just never get around to it,’ she calls as she goes out of the front door. ‘And all that ’70s Formica seems to be back in fashion now.’

  My mother would like to know that. She had a theory that, if you kept anything long enough, it would come back into fashion. I don’t think she ever threw any of her clothes away. She would let them out or down, take them up or in, depending on her size and the prevailing style. And that kept her pretty busy. Where other suburban housewives assuaged their boredom and despair with sherry or chocolate cake or trips to the hairdresser’s, my mother bought clothes. Her wardrobes made Imelda Marcos’s seem like doll’s house furniture. The V&A could have filled a complete floor with her clothes – a history of fashion over the second half of the twentieth century. A history too, I suppose, of her state of mind. A conscientious curator would note the racks and
racks of clothes from the 1960s and ’70s and rather fewer from the years after that. The collection wouldn’t be totally complete. There would be, perhaps, a single glass cabinet for a couple of years during the late ’60s. There would be little from the ’50s and nothing at all from the decades before that.

  I put down the mug, and walk up to the big picture window. There is not much left of the beautiful garden that my mother created out of the building site that surrounded the house when we first moved here. The flowerbeds, with their pink and purple lupins, their sky-blue delphiniums and orange Californian poppies whose pale green conical hats Max and I loved to pull off, have been grassed over. The rockery, whose every piece of stone my mother carried from the car, has been dismantled. The willow tree that she planted is still there, its trunk grown thick and gnarled. The wooden climbing frame with its splintered platform from which we’d jump, or drop parachutes of handkerchiefs and little green plastic soldiers, has been replaced by some kind of aluminium structure with an integral plastic tent in primary colours. The shed we called the Little Wooden House has gone and in its place there is a massive blue trampoline enclosed in a safety net. We kept our mice in that shed, in rows of rusting blue metal cages. Sweet little brown and beige creatures, with shiny fur and beady black eyes. A few weeks after the first batch of mouse-babies were born, and before we mastered the art of mouse-husbandry, they all escaped through the bars. I remember my mother spending a whole afternoon lying on the floor of the shed with a broom, a shoebox and a packet of chocolate buttons, trying to tempt them back into captivity. Max and I helped for a little while, before going off to watch The Golden Shot and leaving her to it. ‘Bernie the bolt!’ We loved it. I think it was Belle and Sebastian we were watching that time she carried bucketload after bucketload of damp sand from the drive where it had been unloaded to the sandpit she was building for us at the far end of the garden. She never asked for help and we never offered it. I wish now that we had.

  The door to what had been my father’s study is shut. My hand hovers over the door handle.

  The room is thick with smoke. On his desk are papers, journals, slides, a tumbler of neat whisky. I know those slides well. I like to take them out of their plastic folders when my father is at work and look at them through his little grey and white slide-viewer. There is something faintly pleasurable about the ripples of nausea that spread through me as I gaze at the images of bloody organs and surgical instruments surrounded by green cotton sheets. In some of the pictures, I see my father’s gloved hand, spattered with blood, holding a scalpel or a suture, and I feel a rush of pride.

  ‘What now?’ he sighs.

  ‘I still can’t do this stupid maths.’

  I am wearing purple – my colour of choice at thirteen. My haircut is modelled on David Cassidy’s. My complexion, sadly, isn’t.

  ‘I’ve just explained it to you,’ he says wearily, and rests his smouldering cigarette on a heavy onyx ashtray.

  ‘I know. But can’t you just do it for me?’

  ‘What would be the point of that?’

  ‘It would be right then, instead of all wrong.’

  ‘But you still wouldn’t know how to do it.’

  ‘Who cares? What’s the point of maths anyway? It’s so boring. You shouldn’t smoke,’ I say conversationally, as, defeated by my mathematical incompetence and grinding insistence, he picks up a pencil and looks at the exercise book I’ve slapped down on top of his papers.

  ‘I like smoking.’ He fills in the gaps on the squared paper that is rough with my increasingly frantic rubbing out. His abandoned cigarette expires, leaving a snake of cold grey ash.

  ‘We had a film about it at school today. It showed a lung full of tar. And then a whole beaker of horrible black sludge. It was disgusting. Smoking kills, you know.’

  ‘Does it?’ my father asks, as he takes out another untipped Player and taps it on the box.

  ‘You should know. You’re a doctor.’

  ‘Yes, dear.’

  ‘Why are you smiling? It’s not funny.’

  ‘No, dear.’ He lights the cigarette with his smooth silver lighter.

  ‘Don’t just say yes dear and no dear. Why don’t you listen to me?’

  ‘I am listening.’

  ‘No, you’re not. What did I just say?

  ‘What, dear?’

  ‘You see, you never listen.’

  ‘Yes, dear. Here – I think this is all correct now.’

  There is a round bald patch on the top of his head that I’ve never noticed before. His skin is grey. His hand shakes as he passes me the exercise book and picks up his glass of whisky. He takes a large sip and shuts his eyes, probably hoping that when he opens them I’ll have gone away and left him in peace. But I don’t want to go away.

  ‘One day you’ll just drop dead of smoking and drinking and stuff and I won’t have ever even known you.’

  ‘Yes, dear,’ he says.

  ‘And if I ever have children, they’ll never even know I had a father.’

  My father smiles again.

  ‘You should care about all that.’

  I can feel my jaw quivering.

  ‘Hello. I’m Ben,’ says a small voice. I turn round and there is a child of about four standing just behind me.

  ‘What are you doing standing outside my playroom?’ he asks. ‘And why are you crying?’

  IV

  My mother managed somehow – I don’t know how – to save some of her housekeeping money and she’d go with tins of soup and other things to the railway sidings and she’d roll them down the hill to the families with the yellow stars who were living by the railway lines. I used to go with her sometimes. And she was always knitting. She’d knit pullovers and give them to the people who were leaving for Holland and when they got to the border they’d wave them out of the window as a sign and my grandparents would shelter them for a few days before they went on their way.

  Did you wonder why the Jews were leaving?

  Not really. They’d been asked to go, so they were going. I was just glad my mother was making life a bit easier for them. We’d knit together in the evenings when my father was away, but I wasn’t nearly as fast as her. We had such a lovely time together then. Or we’d play duets on the piano – my father forbade any music in the house when he was home. I think he thought owning a piano was one thing – the sign of a cultured household – but anyone playing it – or, worse still, enjoying playing it – was quite another thing. Or I’d practise my English. That was the one thing at school that I was really good at. And it felt so wonderful – to really excel at something. To be better than all of my classmates who had teased me so much when I arrived at the school and sat at the back of the classroom, not understanding a word anyone was saying. Who had hated the little Dutch newcomer so much. In the end I was better than all of them. At German and English. Better at English than most of the teachers. I had this textbook with a photograph of Trafalgar Square on the cover – with those huge black lions and the fountains and Nelson’s Column – and that was the one place in the world I was desperate to visit. I don’t know why. There was just something so special about it. I wish I still had that book.

  Do you have anything from that time?

  Nothing. No, not nothing. A small red leather notebook. Like a diary. And a tiny wooden angel.

  A wooden angel?

  Once, my father announced that he’d been called to Cologne on urgent business, so my mother took me to the Christmas Market. All those stalls selling the most beautiful things. Tiny wooden figures and gingerbread stars and spicy sausage. That must have been the first and probably only time my mother met my best friend Helga Lessing. Bringing friends home was not something my father allowed. Helga was there with her parents and her two brothers. Her father was a butcher who’d been unemployed for a long time but their luck had turned. They’d just moved into a house in the centre of Berlin that had suddenly become empty for some reason. We know why now, of course. Hindsight! Tha
t wonderful thing! Before that, they’d all slept in one room somewhere – I don’t know where – I never went. And I remember Herr Lessing said something to my mother like, ‘You must be so pleased with your daughter – all those athletics medals she’s been winning. She’s precisely the kind of girl our Führer would be proud of, don’t you think?’ And my mother just looked at the swastikas on their lapels and didn’t say anything. My mother – who was always so polite and kind to everyone. And I remember Herr Lessing looked rather put out as they walked over to the carousel. I was furious with my mother. I couldn’t believe that she could dismiss them like that just because they were so much poorer than us. Because Helga’s father was a butcher and not an engineer. But she said, ‘How much money they do or don’t have has nothing to do with anything.’ And she took me by the hand and led me over to the stall that sold little carved figures. ‘I’m going to buy you an angel,’ she said. ‘An angel for my angel. You choose the one you like best.’ They were so beautiful, those tiny wooden angels. Some were playing trumpets; some were holding books; some were plucking at harps or singing. There was one which was gazing upwards, its mouth a little red O. And it looked to me as though its heart was bursting with the joy of singing. It was so small that if you put it in the palm of your hand and closed your fingers, no one would ever know it was there. And I thought that this lovely tiny thing would surely be able to escape the furnace. Just after we got home, a telegram arrived, addressed to my father. And my mother opened it very carefully and it said something like ‘Unable to meet you in Cologne as planned, so sorry. With love from your own Katharina.’ And my mother said – and I could see that she was half-smiling, even though she looked worried – ‘Your father’s urgent business meeting has been very unexpectedly cancelled. You’d better hide the wooden angel very carefully and go to bed quickly. He’ll be home any minute and I can promise you he won’t be in a good mood.’ And sure enough, about half an hour later we heard the front door slam. And the next day there was a bruise on my mother’s face. She had tried to cover it up with powder, but I knew it was there.